Hi,

I'm one of the developer of LabPlot. LabPlot is a KDE-application for interactive graphing and analysis of scientific data.
There is some information and couple of screenshots on our homepage http://labplot.sourceforge.net/ and in this blog
http://www.asinen.org/2013/10/labplot-2 ... -analysis/

We're now in the process of moving the project to the KDE-infrastructure (git and bugzilla already migrated) and becoming
part of KDE-Edu. The next release, which will come hopefully in near feature, should happen together with a new homepage
hosted at edu.kde.org and with nice looking icons On kde-edu mailing list I was advised to ask here for help. Currently, we're
using many oxygen icons but also many self-made icons (svg and png). The latter look neither consistent nor nice. So, I'd like
to ask the community to help with icons for the project. Any help on this topic is highly appreciated.

Thanks and best regards
Alexander

Hi Alexander

the 40 icons from src/pics/





and the zip file https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/164 ... abPlot.zip

I had problem to compile with the compile shell script on ubuntu (ERROR: cmake/modules/FindKDE4Internal.cmake not found in), so I can't test LabPlot with the breeze icon set.

Hi Andreas,

looks simple and stylish Was not aware of breeze icon set yet, will try it out today.

To get rid of the error you need to install the dev-package for kdelibs. After running the compile script do "cd build"
and "make install" as root to get the icons installed into the proper directory.

I've got a general question now regarding different icon themes. How this should be handled by the application?
I know, we cannot provide icons for many icon themes available out there. Should we, as the application developers,
stick with the "standard" KDE theme only and provide the oxygen-like icons as a part of the project? What about
other themes? How this is usually handled?


Alexander

asemke wrote:I've got a general question now regarding different icon themes. How this should be handled by the application?
I know, we cannot provide icons for many icon themes available out there. Should we, as the application developers,
stick with the "standard" KDE theme only and provide the oxygen-like icons as a part of the project? What about
other themes? How this is usually handled?

We have guidelines for icon design and usage of the icon theme (and another for icons with text). You should use standard icons as far as possible, that will adopt Oxygen for 4.x and Breeze for 5+ (or whatever the user configured). But if your application makes heavily use of different icons you (or the VDG) have to create your own set, IMHO.

LabPlot icons


Could be integrated into Oxygen


Global Icons (Breeze or Oxygen)

andreas_k wrote:LabPlot icons


Could be integrated into Oxygen


Global Icons (Breeze or Oxygen)

Nice work on those icons andreas_k! Thanks for stepping up and helping out with this.

alake wrote:Nice work on those icons andreas_k! Thanks for stepping up and helping out with this.

thanks.

a new icon for tex, the old one is original style but as you see in the thread difficult to see. The new icon is more "Breeze"

Hi Andreas,

thank you again for the help. I don't exactly get what you're meaning by "could be integrated into Oxygen" and "Global icons (Breeze or Oxygen)".
Do you mean the Oxygen set can be extended and those two icons would be included in this icon set? What about "global icons"?

@Heiko: we try to use as much as possible from the oxygen icon set. However, many things are application specific and we need our icons. Andreas helped to create the first 40 of them, more will be needed in future as we extend the software. Those icons are now in breeze style. The next releases of LabPlot will be based on KDE Platform 4. So we need to provide our icons in oxygen style. When we later move to KDE 5, we'll only need to provide the breeze icons. Right?
Can somebody help out with the oxygen icons?

I'm preparing now some screenshots for the new homepage on edu.kde.org. I installed dynamo icon set. Together with the icons Andreas provided I have now a nice and consistent look in the application. May be I will use these combination now for making screenshots, so I don't need to wait for new icons in oxygen style.

Alexander

asemke wrote:thank you again for the help. I don't exactly get what you're meaning by "could be integrated into Oxygen" and "Global icons (Breeze or Oxygen)".
Do you mean the Oxygen set can be extended and those two icons would be included in this icon set? What about "global icons"?

the global icons are from the breeze theme, so this icons are included into the main theme. the two icons with "could be integrated" are only rotated breeze icons. I can ask Uri to include this two icons into the main theme.

The problem of the global icons is, that the used breeze icons doesn't exist in oxygen, so maybe it would be better to use your own app-icons for the kde 4 version in Oxygen style and for kf 5 in breeze style.

asemke wrote:When we later move to KDE 5, we'll only need to provide the breeze icons. Right?

Since we discuss dark vs. bright icon themes I guess it's not a good idea to have a mixture of hard coded and linked icons. But I'm neither a programmer nor a designer, I feel rather a little bit responsible for the guidelines. I added my two cents in hope the HIG is helpful right now, or to get an advice how to improve it.

Heiko Tietze wrote:

asemke wrote:When we later move to KDE 5, we'll only need to provide the breeze icons. Right?

Since we discuss dark vs. bright icon themes I guess it's not a good idea to have a mixture of hard coded and linked icons. But I'm neither a programmer nor a designer, I feel rather a little bit responsible for the guidelines. I added my two cents in hope the HIG is helpful right now, or to get an advice how to improve it.

I fully agree. As I wrote in the linked thread:
Applications shipping their own icons isn't a good idea in general, because it means that if the user chooses an icon set with a very different style, the icons which the application ships look alien.
If, for example, labplot ships Breeze icons with its KF5-based version, but a Plasma 5 user has selected Oxygen as their general icon theme (they are free to do so!), you have a mixture of Oxygen and Breeze icons in one application, which looks very very bad.
Therefore, all icons an application uses should be part of the standard icon set. If a specific icon theme doesn't provide these icons, the application can still fall back to a default set. But that way at least we give icon sets a chance to provide icons that match their style.

colomar wrote:

asemke wrote:When we later move to KDE 5, we'll only need to provide the breeze icons. Right?

If, for example, labplot ships Breeze icons with its KF5-based version, but a Plasma 5 user has selected Oxygen as their general icon theme (they are free to do so!), you have a mixture of Oxygen and Breeze icons in one application, which looks very very bad.
Therefore, all icons an application uses should be part of the standard icon set. If a specific icon theme doesn't provide these icons, the application can still fall back to a default set. But that way at least we give icon sets a chance to provide icons that match their style.

Ok. So, the solution would be to include all icons the application needs in the standard icon set. I just had a look at the source code of khipu (kmplot). They also have couple of "application specific" icons and will also run into the problem you described. I think, there are couple of icons that can be shared across different edu-projects. May be we need to define a common subset of those icons and try to include them into the standard icon sets (Oxygen and Breeze) first. I think, labplot is and will be in future even more feature-rich and will need more icons that other projects. Can we just include everything what labplot needs into the standard sets (may be after a discussion about good namings)? Who decides what and how to include? Can somebody help also with Oxygen icons?

I'm not sure that all of your icons will go into each available icon set. I would recommend a good separation between standard and application specific functions. The standard toolbar should contain only those actions that are common in every application and have defaults icons. Your app specific functions could be moved into a second toolbar where you need own icons. Which leads to the original question, btw.

But maybe you want to consider to update the UI completely for KF5, to fit into the new design. That means you remove menubar, toolbars, and perhaps the MDI stuff too, simplified, and put these functions into sidebars, context menus or the like. Check out the threads on this forums, e.g. "What-if...", how it could look like.

asemke could you send me a labplot project file that I can test labplot and the icons?

andreas_k wrote:asemke could you send me a labplot project file that I can test labplot and the icons?

We have a couple of demo files in the folder "examples". Do you have the possibility to clone our git-repository?